Mark Pincus > Quotes

“That’s why I love the quote from the French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
― Mark Pincus, Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love – An Actionable Guide to Entrepreneurship and Innovation from the Founder of Zynga

“Games aren’t just play; they’re master classes in behavioral design.”
― Mark Pincus, Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love – An Actionable Guide to Entrepreneurship and Innovation from the Founder of Zynga

“Hope is a belief that’s not supported by any data.”
― Mark Pincus, Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love – An Actionable Guide to Entrepreneurship and Innovation from the Founder of Zynga

“It’s amazing to me that the games industry generates $280 billion and has three billion DAU and yet remains mostly empty calories. If Zynga had managed to stay on our mission of connecting the world through games, perhaps today games could be a good use of people’s time.”
― Mark Pincus, Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love – An Actionable Guide to Entrepreneurship and Innovation from the Founder of Zynga

“At Zynga, we refined streaks into a Golden Mechanic we called Drip Rewards: slow, steady dopamine hits that reward daily player engagement.”
― Mark Pincus, Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love – An Actionable Guide to Entrepreneurship and Innovation from the Founder of Zynga

“Too many founders work with high-level standard metrics like DAU, retention, Average Revenue Per User (ARPU). The problem with these metrics is that they are not leading indicators; they’re trailing outcomes. So, for every product we need to organically identify the metrics that are both early indicators of the future success of our product and ideally represent levers that we can move. In the case of Zynga Poker, we obsessed over hands played and in Words With Friends turns taken because both showed us the true indication of our player engagement, and these also turned out to be the right metrics for our teams to focus on moving.”
― Mark Pincus, Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love – An Actionable Guide to Entrepreneurship and Innovation from the Founder of Zynga

“Marcus Segal, an early employee who left and then came back to Zynga as Chief Operating Officer in 2015, called the passion I tried to instill in people—especially about product—“passing my vampire blood.” You give people your vampire blood when you sell them so hard on your vision and mission that they bleed for it. At Zynga, we used to say that they “bled Zynga red” (which was our brand color).”
― Mark Pincus, Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love – An Actionable Guide to Entrepreneurship and Innovation from the Founder of Zynga

“They created the people web, which became our primary way to have social connections—eventually, even to a fault. Before, we all needed to go out to see people. Today, bars in San Francisco are closing at record rates. The Cocktail Party has gone completely online. I was lucky that Sean showed me this in 2004. But I also foolishly ignored their clearly Proven idea and stubbornly stuck to my own path with Tribe.net.”
― Mark Pincus, Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love – An Actionable Guide to Entrepreneurship and Innovation from the Founder of Zynga

“(In fact, around this same time, Reid put out a thought piece saying that he had been “voicepilled.”)”
― Mark Pincus, Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love – An Actionable Guide to Entrepreneurship and Innovation from the Founder of Zynga

“Know your goal, or suffer death by 1,000 compromises.”)”
― Mark Pincus, Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love – An Actionable Guide to Entrepreneurship and Innovation from the Founder of Zynga

“As I mentioned in the last chapter, our big miss was in not buying Supercell, which ultimately became the leader in mobile games. We had a handshake deal with the founder, Ilkka Paananen, for $400 million, which probably wasn’t even 10 percent of our capitalization, but my board said no. If we had given ourselves permission to truly be too early, we would have made different bets. We would have continued to invest in mobile, and we would have bought Supercell.”
― Mark Pincus, Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love – An Actionable Guide to Entrepreneurship and Innovation from the Founder of Zynga

“Understanding what game you’re playing means understanding your arena, your competitors, your constraints, and, most important, your win conditions. It means knowing whether you’re playing for market share, profitability, user engagement, or network effects—and having the discipline to optimize for that specific outcome. The second question goes deeper. Your theory of the game is your mental model of how success happens in a given domain. What are the dynamics that underlie it? What does everyone else playing in this arena believe that might be wrong—and how can you use that to create a compelling and sustainable advantage? A theory of the game is your hypothesis about cause and effect, timing, and sequencing. It makes the difference between randomly trying things and having a strategic framework that guides your decisions. The best founders don’t just have a theory; they can articulate it, test it, and refine it based on what they learn.”
― Mark Pincus, Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love – An Actionable Guide to Entrepreneurship and Innovation from the Founder of Zynga

“It takes incredible ambition and persistence to build products people love. And when you finally produce something that other people connect with, it’s one of the greatest highs. That’s what I want for all of us.”
― Mark Pincus, Life at the Speed of Play: Launch Products People Love – An Actionable Guide to Entrepreneurship and Innovation from the Founder of Zynga